Building a Credible Case for Safety: Waymo's Approach for the Determination of Absence of Unreasonable Risk

Understand

This paper presents an overview of Waymo's approach to building a reliable case for safety - a novel and thorough blueprint for use by any company building fully autonomous driving systems.

• A safety case for fully autonomous operations is a formal way to explain how a company determines that an AV system is safe enough to be deployed on public roads without a human driver, and it includes evidence to support that determination.
• It involves an explanation of the system, the methodologies used to develop it, the metrics used to validate it and the actual results of validation tests.
• Yet, in order to develop a worthwhile safety case, it is first important to understand what makes one credible and well crafted, and align on evaluation criteria.